


That Kind of Movie

by Anonymous



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Declarations Of Love, Forgiveness, Groundhog Day, Happy Ending, Harry Hart Lives, Love, M/M, Self-Discovery, Temporary Character Death, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-05
Updated: 2015-07-05
Packaged: 2018-04-07 18:41:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4273914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Groundhog Day AU. V-Day keeps re-setting for Eggsy, but it’s not just as simple as making sure that Harry Hart lives. </p><p>Warnings (all apply in the context of a time loop): suicide, harm to animals, murder, canon-typical violence, major and minor character deaths, implied domestic abuse</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Kind of Movie

Eggsy wakes up in Harry’s spare room on the morning of his final day of training to become a Kingsman. The clock is beeping 07.00, and he can hear Harry downstairs. They’ve spent 24 hours together. 

Eggsy doesn’t know it will be their last 24 hours. How could he? If he did, he might have taken longer over breakfast, laughed less at Harry’s stupid apron, insisted on following him even when he was in Harry’s bad books. He’d have done a lot of things. He goes back to Harry’s at the end of the day, and snuggles into the same bed, and if he cries himself to sleep, that’s between Eggsy and God. 

________________

Eggsy wakes up in Harry’s spare room on the morning after the morning of his final day training to become a Kingsman. The clock is beeping 07.00, and he can hear Harry downstairs. This time yesterday, they’d spent 24 hours together. Then Harry had been shot. Which begs the question as to what he’s doing downstairs, making breakfast. 

Eggsy’s seen this kind of movie. The one where the protagonist wakes up every morning in the same day, and tries to make it better, but gets stuck a fucking time loop for a million years until they work out the actual problem. In that precise moment, though, he doesn’t care. He pulls on his clothes with lightning-quick speed, and dashes downstairs; when he sees Harry, alive and well, he rushes up behind him and puts both arms around him, hugging him tightly, burying his face in Harry’s back. He knows what the problem is. Harry Hart has to leave today _alive_. 

“Good morning to you, too,” says Harry. He sounds amused. “Come on, off, I want you to tell me whether you drink the orange juice or the champagne first in a champagne breakfast.” 

He can barely stop touching Harry, just to make sure he’s real. Harry lets him, but is still furious when Eggsy fails the dog test, even though this time he didn’t nick Arthur’s car, all right? Still. Those touches, those little reassurances were a mistake. 

It makes it all so much worse when Valentine shoots Harry in the head. 

_________

He steals a plane every repeated day for what must be two months running. A bunch of them Merlin simply disables, and he’s forced to parachute out; it takes him weeks to work out how to get around that. Then he begins to arrive too late. Once, he arrives just too late, and Eggsy has the singularly horrifying experience of kneeling on warm tarmac, cradling Harry’s head, blood and brain matter on his fingers as he murmurs affectionate platitudes about it all being okay, as he tells Harry how much he loves him. 

Harry dies smiling, which is better, but still not good. 

Eggsy isn’t a particularly talented pilot to begin with, and he crashes a few times. Misjudges his flight path. Gets shot down by the Americans once, and discovers that the day re-sets even if he dies. Fucking great. This is exactly that kind of movie. 

_________

One repeat, he shoots JB, just to see if passing the dog test means he’ll be able to save Harry. The distance is too near, even for blanks, and the poor creature dies slowly, crying out its last breath. 

Eggsy is sick even before he gets outside, and he doesn’t even care when the day resets after he’s failed to save the world. He’s too frightened to do it again, even though Roxy’s poodle always survives, and Mr Pickle apparently survived; he just can’t look at JB and pull the trigger without feeling like a monster. 

_________

He warns the Kingsmen in every way he can think of. Sometimes, he comes up with it, like it’s a brainwave — “of course! Valentine’s going to make people kill each other!” — whereas sometimes he just comes out and says it, gets ignored or brushed off. Sometimes he doesn’t get ignored; it takes him a while to realise that it’s how he says it, not just what he says. 

It still doesn’t help. Harry keeps getting shot. 

Sometimes, Eggsy waits until the massacre in the church has started; he figures it's more believable, that way. That one’s no good, initially, because nothing can cut through the fog of the signal being broadcast to Harry. He has some success overlaying it with white noise, but Harry’s so bewildered that a parishioner cuts him down. 

Sometimes, he waits until the massacre has ended. Taps into Harry’s glasses. “Run, bruv, please, listen to me.”

The reply is invariably, “I have a duty to fulfil, Eggsy,” followed by a swift confrontation and a gunshot. The one time Harry does run, Gazelle slices him to pieces with her legs, which is a) rank, and b) even more heartbreaking than normal, so he never tries suggesting that again. 

_________

He shoots Chester King instead of JB, and later that day, he dies in a prison riot when smuggled phones broadcast Valentine’s signal. Fucking awesome. 

_________

He swaps places with Roxy once or twice. He’s no more successful than she is with the missiles, and she’s always successful in Valentine’s bunker, which is unsurprising, but still a relief. She gets it done, because she’s the man. Merlin always congratulates them both, says to Eggsy that he’d have made Harry proud, and Eggsy is sick in the toilet on the plane home because he can’t keep facing this every fucking day. 

_________

He shoots himself, too, when he’s so tired of the day re-setting. When he wakes up in the spare room at Harry’s the next morning he cries and cries and cries. 

_________

“I’m sorry,” he says, one morning, when the sedative that he put into Harry’s orange juice takes effect. “I’m real sorry.” 

He locks Harry up safely in the panic room, resets the override code, and then goes to tell Chester King where he can put his dog test and his ideas about cleansing the world of undesirables. At the end of the day, he lets Harry out. 

Harry punches him. 

The day re-sets while Eggsy’s still unconscious. 

_________

And then, one day: 

“Eggsy,” says Harry, at breakfast. “Is everything all right?”

It comes out of him like a dam breaking. “You’re gonna die today, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” Are there rules for this sort of thing? He supposes the only rules are the usual social ones, the ones where you don’t say shit like that because people think you’re a nutter if you do. “I’m in some — some sorta time loop, and I keep seeing you die over, and over, and over, and I can’t take it, because I love you and I don’t want you to die…”

He realises that Harry’s got up from his seat, and he crushes Eggsy to his chest in the warmest, tightest hug Eggsy can imagine. 

“Sssh,” says Harry. “I suppose we have been working you very hard.” 

Eggsy clings to him. “Please just stay here. Please, Harry. You’re going to get angry with me, and then you’re going to get sent to America, and you’re going to die.” 

“I can’t just stay here, darling,” says Harry. He doesn’t even seem to have registered that he just called Eggsy ‘darling’. “I swore an oath to protect people. I can’t just ignore that.” He brushes his hand over Eggsy’s hair. “I can imagine being angry with you, but I can’t imagine it being permanent. We’ll get through this.” 

“But you’re gonna die.” 

“Tell me how I die,” says Harry. “And I’ll do my best to avoid it.” 

He kisses Eggsy’s forehead, and Eggsy melts. He tells Harry, still tucked to Harry’s chest, still shaking with the exhaustion and overload of the last however long it’s been. Harry, to his credit, listens; he strokes Eggsy’s hair, and lets Eggsy talk. 

“Please don’t say I’m overworked, or making it all up, or something stupid like that,” Eggsy finishes. “I’m not. I’m really not.” 

“Stranger things than this have happened before,” Harry says, thoughtfully. “And there’s no way for you to know about the dog test in such intimate detail.” 

“I tried shooting JB, and the gun — the blanks — Roxy said later it was because I was too close, but I can’t even bring myself to — it was fucking horrible, I killed him, and he was crying an’ all…“ 

“It’s all right,” says Harry, still cradling him close. “Next time, stand. Take four paces back. Pretend you’re worried, nervous; use it to give yourself some distance.” 

Eggsy’s cried all over Harry’s apron. It’s a fucking ridiculous apron, and now it’s a fucking ridiculous wet apron. 

“I can’t keep doing this. I need to get out of the loop.” 

“If you’re willing to change, it might be the answer,” says Harry. “That was the answer for Bill Murray in that film about groundhogs.” 

“I have changed, ain’t I?” 

“Only you can answer that,” says Harry. “Come on. I’ll insist on being there for your dog test, and we’ll make it through today.” 

Harry insists, and he stands in the corner, watching like a hawk. Damningly, Chester’s behaviour changes — and JB waddles out of the room, alive and well. With Eggsy there as backup, Harry makes it out of the church, too, and they defeat Valentine together. It’s never felt more right — Eggsy’s never felt better about the loop than he has today. Maybe all it took was breaking down and trusting Harry to catch him. 

Harry kisses him properly when they get home. They sit up all night, Eggsy resting his head on Harry’s shoulder, and he doesn’t quite register when he greys out, but he wakes up to the alarm beeping 7:00 am. 

_________ 

 

He tells Harry again, and again. Eventually Harry suggests a code phrase that is his special secret one, and that makes the telling much easier — there’s no incredulity, just acceptance. It’s shocking how much Harry trusts him — and a cogent reminder of how hurt Harry must have been when he’d fucked up the dog test, stolen a car, and reverted to his old childish persona. 

Harry survives more often, these days. It’s a huge part of the puzzle; solving the friction between them (or turning it into an altogether more pleasurable friction) doesn’t break the day repeating. Harry living doesn’t break it. Not even safely imprisoning Valentine before he can kill people, and breaking up his ring of celebrities and world leaders breaks the time loop. 

The day just repeats, and repeats, and repeats. 

 

_________ 

 

He makes a list. Not just of the things he wants to do with Harry — the things he wants to do with everyone, and the things he wants to change. It vanishes every morning, of course, and he rewrites it, memorising it easily after the first few times. And there’s versions of himself in the list that haven’t changed, that might be — scratch that, that _are_ the answer. If Bill Murray got out of his time loop by being a better person, Eggsy has to sort his shit out, and because no-one else can remember from loop to loop, he has to be the driving force behind it. 

And shit, aren’t there a lot of different Eggsys. The Eggsy who got pissed off and stole a car is still there, on that first and many other loops. The Eggsy who refused to give himself agency when it came to solving his problems hangs around like that loser friend who’s still stuck in the glories of high school. The Eggsy who blames everyone and everything but himself clings to the time loop like a bad smell. 

The Eggsy who blames his Mum for being depressed after she lost the love of her life shamefully slinks in. Then there is the Eggsy who expects Harry to save him, and then is devastated when Harry can’t, and he’ll be the hardest to part with. 

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man,” Harry reminds him, once or twice, as Eggsy tells him everything in the morning and they spend a few precious hours planning before Harry forgets it all. “True nobility is being superior to your former self.” 

“Hemingway,” says Eggsy. 

Harry’s smile is electric. “Well done!” 

Eggsy holds onto it, a weird form of hope that he keeps like a fragile and precious thing, crystal and glass. “Superior to your former self.” He carries it with him like a mantra. “Superior to your former self. Superior to your former self.” 

And so he starts becoming superior to his former self. The day loops, no matter what he does, and so he spends the time in it. Once a week he tries to save the world, in the fading hope it’ll break the cycle, but it never does. 

Sometimes, he just spends it with his Mum, talking with her, learning her as an adult rather than as a child. He spends time with his sister, playing; spends time with Rox, and learns what it was like growing up as a girl in a family of boys who’d inherit titles, what it’s like being privileged but still different. He even spends the day with Merlin, sometimes, and he feels like a real arse for those first few loops when he went and fucked Princess Tilde; he should have realised that Merlin’d had an awful V-day, with Harry and Chester dying, keeping an eye on feeds that told him more of his mates were on the ropes and going down, being the one to flip the switch that killed so many damn people. 

That said, he does spend some loops with Princess Tilde. Gets to know her past the stress reaction and the life-affirming fucking, and just learns and learns and learns. She’s a good teacher, and he’s sure Swedish will come in handy someday. 

He realises that there’s good Eggsys, too — there’s the Eggsy who won’t shoot a dog to get a fucking job, the Eggsy who’s loyal to his mates. The Eggsy who will risk anything for his sister, for his friends, for the world — he’ll fight, and die if he has to. There’s the Eggsy who is intelligent; the Eggsy who is talented; the Eggsy who is worth someone or something trapping him in a time loop until he gets it right. 

And of course he spends loops with Harry. Sometimes he can even convince Harry to kiss him — he’s falling more and more in love as the loops pass by, and he knows by now that Harry’s in love with him, too, and was waiting for training to be over, waiting for the power imbalance to be a little less weighted before he made a move. 

That power imbalance was never going to shift with the old Eggsy. This Eggsy? He thinks maybe he’s older than Harry now, in his head, and he’s still got a ton to learn. But he has learned that he can do without Harry Hart, even though it hurts — and that he is worthy of love, aside from anything Harry wants to give him — and that he is capable in his own right. He can speak four languages after countless days learning; fly pretty well anything, shoot like an olympian, hack like a pro; he can step up to Dean and not want to shove his knee (or his knife) into the guy’s crotch; he can wake up and leave the house almost immediately, even knowing as he does so that Harry’s going to die. That no matter what happens in that day of the loop, Harry’s choices will be his own. 

Eggsy warns him, each morning, and some days Harry comes home and some days he dies, and Eggsy learns to live with it, like an anchor wrapped around his heart. 

_________ 

Eggsy wakes at 7.00am, with the alarm blaring. He gets up, dresses carefully, goes downstairs, where he wraps his arms around Harry from behind, just for the pleasure of having him near. Harry laughs, makes the same comment as he did the first time they looped, and lets Eggsy turn him. Eggsy leans in and kisses him, confident that Harry’ll kiss back, even though this Harry doesn’t remember thousands and thousands of versions of this very day. 

“Why now?” Harry asks, trailing his fingers down Eggsy’s cheek. 

“Why not now?” Eggsy replies. 

“An elegant argument,” says Harry, and Eggsy kisses him again, explains it all like he does most mornings. Harry listens. Asks intelligent questions. Accepts the code passphrase with no complaints. Eggsy’s learned how to get him to listen, and maybe Harry’s picked up something in all these repeats, even if he don’t remember. 

“And after all this,” says Eggsy, eventually, “I’m in love with you. I’m not sorry I’m in love with you, but I am sorry to spring it on you. We’ve had so many versions of today together that I feel like I know you inside and out.” 

“You have the advantage over me,” Harry replies. 

“Yeah, I suppose I do.” 

“I think—“ says Harry. “I think that I’ve been telling myself that I was doing all this to repay Lee, but I was wrong. I was doing all this because you’ve brought something back to me that I didn’t know was missing, and selfishly, I wanted to keep you.” 

“You got me for however long you want me,” says Eggsy. “But there’s a few things I need to do this morning, all right?” 

He calls in on his Mum before going in for the dog test; it’s still early, and the sky is that perfect clean colour, before the grime of the day’s had a chance to settle in. He slips into the house, puts the kettle on, helps her change his sister and they have a cuppa, leaning against the kitchen bench to talk. He doesn’t take long to get down to business, once she’s finished exclaiming about his suit. 

“You know I don’t blame you for any of it, right?” he asks. “But I want us to be able to go back to where we were. And I want you to be able to lean on me, rather than me blaming my problems on you, and us, and our lives before I got into Kingsman. It weren’t your fault. I lost someone I loved, fuck, I loved him more than anything, and I get it now — I get how bad it hurts, and how it never goes away, and how you can just be somewhere, like, down the shops or something, and the grief hits you so hard you want to go to your knees with it.” She’s crying now, just silent tears, and he takes her in his arms. “I love you. I love you so much, Mum. And I want us to be happy.” 

“Baby,” she manages, like sunshine through her tears, and that’s when Dean gets in. 

“Muggsy,” he leers. 

“Morning, Dean,” says Eggsy. He’s spent a few loops with Dean; still doesn’t particularly like or understand the guy, but he knows a bit more of what makes him tick. “Got some news for ya.” 

“What you thinking, coming around here like some posh bastard in a suit? What you tryin’ ta prove?” 

“I don’t need to prove anything to you,” says Eggsy. “Me and Mum and me sis’s moving out. And you wanna make sure you’re somewhere safe, later today.” 

“Is that a threat?” Dean’s sizing him up. 

Eggsy shakes his head. “No. There’s, like, a nutter in Siberia what’s gonna try and kill two thirds of the world’s population. And much as I’d like to beat the shit outta you for what you done to me and mine over the years, I don’t think you deserve to die. So believe me if you like. Don’t believe me if you don’t like. But steer clear of the pub; stay here or something, lock yourself in, do something smart for once in your life.” He sighs, and then blocks Dean’s incoming punch, grabs his arm, twists it behind Dean’s back, talks right into his ear. “I really don’t wanna have to hurt you, bruv. But I will if I need t’keep me family safe. And I don’t wanna say nothing about you not seeing each other no more, because that’s Mum’s decision, not mine. But I finally got the cash to move us somewhere nice; somewhere we’re not depending on you. Makes things more fair, right?” 

He lets go. 

“Dean, love, we’ll talk later,” says Mum. “Once I’ve had a chance to think this over. I’m not saying never. But Eggsy’s right. It’s my choice, and I want to make it from somewhere that isn’t here.” 

Dean’s exit is marked by an incredible amount of invective — he’s hurt and humiliated, and Eggsy does hope he finds somewhere safe, just in case. He doesn’t want his sister to have no father, not really; but he would like her father to do a better job of things. He pulls the sim from his Mum’s mobile, and flushes it down the loo. She shakes her head. “You’re really convinced of this, ain’t you?” 

“Yeah,” he says. “And you’re gonna be safe. I promise. I know a house with a panic room.” 

Harry doesn’t complain when Eggsy and his little family show up and settle in the panic room; rather, he picks up Eggsy’s sister, jiggles her on his hip, and takes her to the downstairs bathroom to show her the butterflies and Mr Pickles. She squeals with delight, and Eggsy makes a mental note to do this again tomorrow — this is his favourite loop so far. There’s something satisfying about it in a way that it hasn’t been like before. 

He’s noticing things more; he sits curled up next to Harry on the way in to HQ, close enough to smell his cologne and see the threads in his jacket. It’s more comforting than he’d first assumed it might be. 

“I’ll be right outside,” says Harry, when it’s time for the dog test. “I promise.” He pauses. “I — I do love you. So you know, if things go wrong.” 

Eggsy’s heart soars. This time, he paces across the room, gets a long way from JB. Sights the gun, fires it, and then reloads it with the clip he’d palmed earlier, slips it into his holster. It’s tempting to cheat and kill Chester now, but they’ve got to let events run their course, or the arrests will be unwarranted — literally as well as figuratively — and even though the odds are that today will loop, he owes it to himself and to everyone else to give this the best chance of success. 

“Can I go with you?” he asks Harry, once a spluttering Chester has left. “Please?” 

“Your father died on his first field mission.” 

Eggsy smiles. “I promise I won’t die on this one.” 

Actually, it’s one of those rare days when almost no-one dies. It turns out Harry’s spent his time well whilst waiting for the inevitable gunshot from the parlour — he’s called Merlin, told him about Eggsy’s “mobile phone theory” (without mentioning time loops), and as a result, they have M-branch jamming technology and a portable EMP device when they land in Kentucky. Valentine, presumably knowing he’s outmatched, flees. Back in England, Arthur is apprehended trying to flee, and to everyone’s shock — including Eggsy’s, who thought he’d seen everything by now — Merlin shorts out the chip in Arthur’s neck with an M-branch mini EMP ring, removes it safely, and for the first time in a loop, figures out how to disable it. 

It doesn’t remove the challenge of getting into Valentine’s lair, but that is rather mitigated by Harry recording a message for the people in there which Merlin plays on all the screens — it’s very stirring, with references to nobility and kindness and charity for one’s fellow man, and finishes with the ultimate kicker: _Did you realise we’ve disabled your chips, so you’re susceptible to the signal? We’re offering you a chance to surrender._

It’s almost too easy to fight Gazelle. He learned a while back that there was a catch on her swords so that they didn’t get blunted by normal walking, and it’s not too hard to kick the catches hard enough to break them. She’s still deadly with her hands, but they ain’t got blades, so the fight’s fairer. And they’ve got all the Kingsmen, this time; Eggy’s not stuck going after people one by one. He hears over the tannoy — now under Kingsman control — that Roxy’s taken out the satellites, and Eggsy knows that Percy’s there to catch her, to hug her and tell her how well she’s done; he’s glad, cos he knows she’s terrified, and having her big bro tell her how good she’d been will buoy her up for days. 

Gawain and Tristan are incredible backup in the mountain lair — they hold back the surging crowd when they panic as the Kingsmen arrive. It’s Harry who kills Valentine, though, with a clean shot to the head before he has a chance to put his paws on the biometric panel, and Eggsy bites down on the inside of his cheek to stop himself grinning like a loon at the fact that Harry just shot someone in the head and splattered his brains _everywhere._

They let the VIPs out of their cages, and replace them with the party guests and a paper trail for the UN. Eggsy still takes the time to find Tilde; he knows she’s had a rough week. He knows just how horrible it is to see someone you care for — and she’d cared for her guards, she’d told him as much — sliced to bits by Gazelle. He also knows someone else who hasn’t had quite such a rough week in this loop, but has done more than Eggsy’s done this time to save the world. Merlin regards him incredulously when he arrives at the plane with Tilde in tow. 

“D’ya mind if we give the Princess a ride home?” Eggsy asks, innocently. “Your Highness? This is Merlin, and he just saved the world.” 

“Hello Merlin,” says Tilde, gazing at him. It’s probably not Eggsy’s imagination that she’s checking Merlin out; she’d confided to him in one loop that brave, good-looking, discreet men were her Thing, and she’d be happy to be introduced to any that he knew.

“Hello, your Highness,” Merlin says, colour rising in his cheeks. “Do come aboard.” 

It’s then that Harry joins them, a little out of breath from running, and Eggsy can’t help the grin that cracks his features. 

“Eggsy,” says Harry, joy written in his every motion. “My darling. We did it.” 

“I fucking love you, Harry Hart,” Eggsy says, and Harry sweeps him into an embrace, Merlin and Tilde forgotten. And he gets another kiss from Harry Hart, and another, and goes home to rescue his family from the panic room, and they’re all alive, every one. 

(And instead of falling asleep alone, or shooting himself, or stumbling out into traffic, Eggsy has the pleasure of Harry’s weight pressing him down into the mattress, the pleasure of languid we-just-saved-the-world sex followed by we-just-saved-the-world kisses, the pleasure of being in Harry’s bed, curled in Harry’s arms, exhausted, sated, and completely in love.) 

____________

 

The alarm bleeps at 7:00. Beside Eggsy, another warm body stirs, grumbles, and then throws an arm over him to drag him close. Eggsy stiffens in shock. 

“What is it, darling?” asks Harry Hart, kissing him. Eggsy kisses back, morning breath be damned. 

“It’s tomorrow,” he replies, melting into Harry, because fuck yes, it’s tomorrow. “Harry, it’s tomorrow, and I’m with you.” 

“You can be with me always, if you’d like,” says Harry, kissing him again. 

“Yeah, I’d like that,” Eggsy replies, sliding their legs together, revelling in the feel of skin-on-skin, leg hairs staticky against each other. It’s remarkably real, as if the last however many years he’s spent in V-day were nothing but a dream. 

“So you got out of your time loop?” Harry asks, and Eggsy loves him — he’s not casting doubt, or being a jackass; he means it, he believes Eggsy, and he means it.

“Yeah. I don’t know what did it, but it’s not fucking V-day anymore.” 

“Bloody good thing, that.” 

“I think maybe—“ Eggsy considers it. “Maybe it wasn’t just about saving my future. Maybe it was about making it a future worth saving.” 

“And this is it?” 

“Yeah,” he says, looking at Harry across the pillows, reaching out a hand to touch and make sure. “It really is.” He smiles. Harry kisses his fingertips, and Eggsy feels it right to his core. “Yeah. Definitely. No more repeats. From now on, it’s one day at a time.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks very much to the kind people who welcomed this anon to the fandom; you all made me happier than I can possibly say.


End file.
